So, a new mosque is being built on the site of a building damaged on 9/11

This, of course, is an excuse for silly, snotty, annoying people to go on record as being bigots... no, unstrike that, as being bigots.

Don't read the comments unless you like screaming at the computer.

Two articles

One about how Neanderthals and Humans may have totally had hot, hot sex.

( Read more... )

And one about the AAP and female circumcision.

Apparently, the AAP is suggesting that instead of banning the procedure outright (and thus prompting families to send their girls back to Africa where the whole shebang can be done without any sort of sanitary equipment) that instead we allow a very minor version in a hospital.

I can actually see where they're coming from. They're saying that if people will do it anyway, better it be done safely. And I imagine they're thinking that by controlling this themselves they can make sure the most minor form of FGM is done instead of the most major.

( Read more... )

Today is the anniversary of my father's death.

It was also a Friday. (This means, I realize now, that my mother didn't even get a Mother's Day that year, which must have just sucked.)

That year one of my sister's routines for the dance recital was to Carribean Blue. My father used to stay in the waiting room while we practiced because, really, there was no point in heading home just to turn around and come back. I guess he liked the song, and it is a pretty song, and that year that one dance was dedicated to him.

And this was what was playing when I went out to get dinner tonight. Here I am trying to watch the girls, order the food, and listen to the song.

I actually stayed at the dance studio the day my father died, until somebody could pick me up. It was close to the bus stop. It seems strange to me, it was years ago, but I can remember the studio so well - the chairs, sitting on the carpet carefully shaking a soda to watch the bubbles (NOT to open it later, thank you!), the paneling in the dressing room, the cardinal that lived in the overgrown backyard that you couldn't get into. (I thought it was a robin. I'd never seen a robin that I knew of, and I knew from reading English books that robins are called Robin Redbreast, so I thought a redbird must be a robin. I can recall it now and realize it was a cardinal the whole time.)

I can remember details of places and things so clearly, but specific stories? Specific times at the dance studio waiting with my father, or dancing...? Those memories could be gathered together in a small heap, and tied with string. It's not fair. I'd rather remember all the individual stories but be unclear on how, exactly, things looked and sounded during them.